Dead Wake | Erik Larson | 2015
Dead Wake, one of Erik Larson’s better-known works, describes the sinking of the ocean liner Lusitania in 1915. In this review I honor my usual rule about avoiding spoilers … well … for the most part.
Joseph Stalin once said, “One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.” While taking in Larson’s prose – prose that makes victims of a tragedy into three-dimensional flesh and blood people in advance of terrible events – I remembered Stalin’s quote. In this book and others, Larson makes sure his readers know who people are – people from a time when civilians didn’t expect to be victims of war, people who believed wars were fought on battlefields between soldiers, not by targeting civilians. But above all, people, not statistics.
Without revealing too much, the book provides many perspectives – of the Lusitania’s captain, of a German submarine skipper, of ship crew-members who were expected to know how to launch a lifeboat under duress, even the state of mind of England’s First Lord of the Admiralty, who later tried to hold the Lusitania’s captain responsible for the tragedy – a young, inexperienced official named Winston Churchill.
As I read this account I remembered a parallel event. The US Navy tried to hold the captain of the Indianapolis responsible for its sinking, a story I can tell without breaking my no-spoilers rule. The Indianapolis was the ship that carried the first nuclear weapons to Tinian Island during the closing days of World War II, in advance of the attacks against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As it sailed back to its port of origin, the Indianapolis was attacked and sunk by a Japanese submarine, after which the surviving crew, supported only by lifejackets in shark-infested waters, waited nearly four days for rescue, during which over 500 sailors died, many from shark attacks. This tragedy remains the largest loss of life in a single attack in US Navy history.
The US Navy convened a court-martial and tried to hold the ship’s captain responsible for the attack and sinking, arguing that the skipper should have been sailing a zig-zag course to thwart submarine attack. As it happens this was exactly the same argument Winston Churchill made against the Lusitania’s captain in 1915. So … picture me reading a rather thick book, when suddenly a cartoon light bulb appears over my head.
But there’s more. You may not believe this, but the captain of the Indianapolis called the Japanese submarine captain to the witness stand, who argued that a zig-zag course would have made no difference, his attack against the Indianapolis would have been successful regardless. I remind my readers that this court-martial took place in November 1945, scarcely four months after the Japanese surrender.
In both cases – the Indianapolis in 1945 and the Lusitania in 1915 – the captains were eventually cleared of wrongdoing and returned to active service.
I know many modern readers don’t give war stories a high rank in book choices, often for good reasons, but Dead Wake is only partly a war story and mostly a human story. It’s also one of Larson’s most readable books, educational and entertaining in equal measure.